Tag Archives: government

“How Democrats Made America Exceptional”

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Indeed.  But not in a good way.  Alan Colmes has an op-ed of this title in The Wall Street Journal; let’s look at some of his claims.

Conservatives blast the left for not appreciating “American exceptionalism”—even though Barack Obama is the only president to have ever used that phrase, at least in the past eight decades or so.

Which Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama did pejoratively:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Sure.  Our exceptionalism is just one among 20.  Or 192.  But this is a minor quibble.

Here’s the important stuff.  Here’s Social Security, for example.

Roosevelt created Social Security [wrote Colmes], a program that today keeps 40% of seniors above the poverty line and helps families with disabilities and those who have lost loved ones.

FDR did this at a time when there were seven American workers for every retiree, and the retirees had a life expectancy of five years in retirement.  Moreover, FDR designed it as a supplemental income program, with the retirees still expected to look to their families for any additional support needed.  Today, Social Security has three workers for every retiree, and the retirees have a life expectancy of fifteen years in retirement.  And today’s family man is taxed for the current retirement support of utter strangers.  He’s not allowed to set that money aside for his own retired parents in particular, or for his own future retirement.  Under these demographic facts, Colmes objects to redesigning Social Security, so that the promise of a safety net can be kept—if under different guise.

[Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan] wants to dismantle that same Social Security program.

No, let’s just leave it alone, and let it fail completely.

Food stamps.  Ah, yes.

Today the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, feeds one in seven Americans. The program was established in 1939 by FDR’s then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.  Recipients are not all lazy bums sitting on their posteriors….

The only ones talking about food stamp recipients being lazy are Progressives trying to distract by denying a charge that isn’t being made.

More importantly, though, Colmes actually recites that food stamp dependency ratio like it’s a good thing that government policies have reduced 15% of Americans to such straits.  But why do we have a food stamp program at all?  FDR, via the National Labor Relations Act, put a floor under the wages employers were allowed to pay—at the height of the Depression, with 20+% unemployment—thus making it too expensive for employers to hire.  On top of this, he put a floor, with his Agricultural Adjustment Acts, under the price of food at which farmers could sell, ensuring that all of those out of work Americans—too many now unemployable by law—could not afford their daily bread.  Enter FDR’s food stamps, in an attempt to enable the artificially priced out of work to buy their food at those artificially inflated prices.  And those CCC and WPA programs of which Colmes is so proud?  Well-intentioned, to be sure.  But they worked in concert with FDR’s price and wage floors to crowd out the private employers that otherwise would have done the hiring—with the private economy’s far greater impact.  Indeed, these New Deal policies, far from providing relief from the impact of the Depression, prolonged it.

“Reproductive rights.”  Colmes has this to say:

The fight for women’s rights continues, as regressives try to put an end to already-established reproductive rights. Even if you don’t believe that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, as a 2011 Guttmacher Institute study showed, the overwhelming majority has[.]

and

If Messrs. Romney and Ryan have their way, reproductive rights would be overturned and millions of Americans denied health-care coverage.

Here Colmes is cynically conflating the right to choose to have children—or not—with insurance coverage for the birth control mechanisms and abortifacients that facilitate that choice.  And he insists that it’s OK to force people or their religious institutions to pay for these even when it goes against their religious beliefs.  The fact that so many of us are sinners, anyway, somehow excuses this.  More, Colmes conflates objection to being forced to pay for something that violates one’s conscience with denial of availability altogether.  This is just more cynicism.  There’s nothing wrong with birth control for those who want it.  Insurance policies even exist that cover the incredibly cheap contraceptives as well as the abortifacients.  The problem is when the user is, by law, allowed to force others to pay for her contraceptives, her abortifacients, instead of buying them with her own money.

Colmes’ Progressives want the wrong type of exceptionalism for America.  They don’t want the old, foundational exceptionalism of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and a limited government that recognizes both the fundamental wisdom of Americans and that it has no standing to do for us for our own good.  They want Big Government acting in our stead.

Hmm….

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Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama had a lot of rhetoric in his acceptance speech last night.  He also had this, ostensibly referring to Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney:

You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.

Was Obama really talking about himself, though?  After all, he’s the one who insulted Great Britain by sending back to them the bust of Churchill that had sat in the oval office for years, a gift from our closest ally.  And then doubled down on the mess by giving an iPod full of Obamatalk to Queen Elizabeth. He’s the one who travelled to Copenhagen to make a personal plea (“I’m the President,” he said then, and in his speech last night) for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics, only to see them go with Rio de Janeiro without any further consideration of Chicago’s bid.

How’d he do in Beijing last week, then?

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China has laid claim to the entire South China Sea, nearly to the shores of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.  Without any opposition from anyone, other than helpless protests from those victimized nations—and idle chit-chat from the pivoted-toward-Asia United States.

Another Thought on Government

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One line from Michelle Obama’s speech on the opening day of the just concluded Democratic Party’s convention jumped out at me, and it did so because it epitomizes the difference between Progressive and Conservative views of government and responsibility.

[W]hen you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you.  You reach back and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.

Indeed, conservatives not only believe this, we live it.  Arthur Brooks, the author of Who Really Cares, says:

[W]hen you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more.  And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less [6% less] money.

and

…conservatives are 18 percent more likely to donate blood.

Here are some more numbers from Brooks, via George Will:

In the 10 reddest states [in 2004], in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

There are notable exceptions to this.  The Clintons and Obamas, on the other hand, gave significant per centages of their income to charity.  But these exceptions demonstrate the truth in the data.

Conservatives already are, as a matter of course, reaching back and helping others.  We’re reaching sideways and helping others with current problems, too.  And we reach forward—we pay it forward [emphasis added]:

…lower income people give more [than those better off] because they think they are more likely to need charity or know someone who needs charity.

We don’t need government to force us to do our duty.  We don’t need government to dictate to us what our charities will be, or the mechanisms by which we will help.

Progressives, though, do need government to prod them, apparently, as they project this shortcoming of theirs onto all Americans.  From Brooks (Will), again [emphasis in the Will cite]:

People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.

Mrs Obama was, in fact, preaching to the choir.  She was just in the wrong church.

Two Thoughts on Government

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This video is what the Democratic Party used to open its convention in Charlotte, NC last week:

The Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To

Here, on the other hand, is the Preamble to our Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

So.  Do we work for government, or does government work for us?  Do we belong to government, or does government belong to us?

Ronald Reagan answered this in his inaugural address in January 1981:

We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.

We’ll take a step toward deciding this—again—in November.

Entitlements and Dependency

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William Galston had an interesting piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal as part of a debate concerning the role of government.  However, his title for his column shows a profound…misunderstanding…of what it is to be an American, of what it is that has made the United States so exceptional on the world stage and in history: “They’re Part of the Civic Compact.”

The very term “entitlement” displays a breathtaking move away from self-reliance and recognition of the immorality of government-mandated wealth transfers.  A man deserves something simply because he exists according to “entitlement.”  Indeed, he deserves an equal share, even though he has done nothing to earn it.  “Entitlement” and “earning,” though, are mutually exclusive conditions.  More, the man who lives on entitlements has become entirely dependent on the provider of the entitlement, his government.  He no longer is free.

Further, the title itself evinces a misreading of our history.  By way of illustration, I offer a couple of remarks by James Madison.  First, Congressman Madison had this to say concerning a bill before the 3rd Congress which was intended to provide help to French refugees from the Haitian Revolution.

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

Madison also had this to say in an 1831 letter to his friend, James Robertson:

With respect to the words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them.  To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.

Moreover, the outcome of the trend toward an entitlement state is acknowledged by Galston himself.

As far as I can tell, [Nicholas] Eberstadt’s statistics [in the companion article] accurately represent the trends on which he focuses.

An outcome of those trends?  As Eberstadt put it:

The US is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government.

In other words, we’re about to reach the point where half of our country is dependent on government—dependent on the other half of our country—for its subsistence.

Our duties to our fellows, especially including those who are less fortunate than us, are clear and present; they are at the foundation of our, and of our nation’s, Judeo-Christian heritage.  But our duties are individual, and they can only be discharged by each of us, or by groups of us acting in concert through our charities, our churches, or our local communities, thereby pooling our individual resources according to our own views of, and capacity for, the means of assistance.  Our duties are not collective, and they cannot be wished off onto a government for it to relieve us of our responsibilities.

Galston makes this very point,

When I do something for you that you would be hard-pressed to do for yourself and you respond by helping me with something I find difficult, we depend on one another and are the stronger for it.[]

and then he misunderstands it.  He insists instead that government must be the first entrant into this exchange and that it must be the middleman in all such exchanges.  Then he demonstrates the failure of this in practical terms, and misses his own demonstration:

In the first place, we are an aging society.  Our massive investments in public schools and universities at the height of the baby boom have given way increasingly to the funding of hospitals and nursing homes.  A second trend has exacerbated the consequences of aging: the near-disappearance of the pensions and health insurance for retirees that employers provided in the decades after World War II.  The third trend is macroeconomic.  During the generation after World War II, the economy grew briskly, and the fruits of that growth were widely shared.  Since then, growth has slowed, the distribution of gains has become more concentrated at the top, and less-educated workers have seen their wages stagnate while their benefits wither.

How could this be otherwise?  With money being withdrawn from the private economy at the alarming rate described by Eberstadt and accepted by Galston, of course growth has slowed.  Further demonstrating his confusion, he notes the transfer of private benefit-related agreements between employee and employer to a concept of entitlement from government without comment.  On top of this, he accepts the local (and state) funding of public schools and universities as in some strange way equivalent to Federal funding of health facilities while tacitly assuming that such Federal funding is somehow appropriate.

The growth of the entitlement state, with its taking of the fruits of success from those more successful, and transferring those fruits to others who did not earn them, not only truncates that success, it removes incentives from both sides: the one to work harder for more success, the other to work hard for his own success.  Indeed, this overhead cost that is this transfer prevents all participants, in Teddy Roosevelt’s words, from “showing the best that there is in him.”  And it tries to transfer the moral duties of both—the one to take care for the least among us, and the other to do all he can so as not to be a burden on others—to government.

Galston then offers Social Security as an example and uses it to deny a moral dilemma [emphasis added].

Social Security works this way [a privately purchased annuity for the benefit of the purchaser] for millions of Americans.  For many others, it is more complicated: Some can expect to receive more than the actuarial value of their contributions, others less.  Americans in the latter category are helping to fund retirement for those in the former.  In effect, some workers are relying on others for a portion of their retirement income.  But again, this quantitative premise does not imply a disturbing moral conclusion.

But he misunderstands the morality of this situation.  (As an aside, Galston conflates a privately purchased annuity for the benefit of the purchaser with a tax on some for the express purpose of transferring that money to the benefit of others.  Privatization of Social Security of any sort, though, is anathema to Progressives, which makes the conflation all the more…interesting.)  Galston’s first misunderstanding is  this.  His description ignores the original purpose of Social Security—to be supplemental income, not replacement income, with the retirees expected to continue to rely on their families for the rest of their needs (and for a shorter time than today, but demographics are a distinct matter).

Second, our modern, distorted Social Security system denigrates those family ties.  It makes the retiree dependent on a collection of strangers for his replacement income rather than on his own family for help with his retiree expenses.  At the same time, this system takes money away from a family man that he could otherwise commit to supporting his own retired parents and transfers it to a retired stranger.

Finally, by making the retiree dependent on government for his entire support (neglecting medical expenses; Medicare is of a piece with this, though), government is robbing the retiree of his opportunity to honor his own morality—the effort of being the primary source of his own sustenance.

Galston “would make a similar argument about the Earned Income Tax Credit, which supplements the earnings of low-wage workers,” but the practical and moral argument is similar here, too.

Finally, this moral failure flows directly from economic truisms: taxing a thing (and taxes, whether present or future, are the source of funds for the transfers) causes less of it to be produced, while subsidizing another causes more of that to be produced.  Taxing the fruits of labor—especially for the purpose of simply giving the collected funds to another—leads to less labor, either outright, or through poorer quality labor.  Paying people for not working lowers the incentive—the need—to seek employment.

Contra Madison, in a small way government has a (very limited) role in seeing to the sustenance of those who cannot help themselves, but only as a last resort, after private, charity and church, and local community resources have been exhausted.  But these cannot have their full effect until an overgrown, and overwrought, government gets out of our way.